Wolfe being clear on 5HoC

b sharp · 07 Sep 2006, 11:18 · from 2006-September.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: bsharporflat at hotmail.com (b sharp)
Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 07:18:19 -0400
Subject: (urth) Wolfe being clear on 5HoC
Message-ID: <BAY103-F17E989834E667218AE572AD7360 at phx.gbl>

Tony Ellis writes:

>To be fair, it sometimes feels like cheating to bring an external Wolfe 
>quote into an argument

I disagree because I consider everything in here, even the arguments, a 
collaboration working toward a common goal, not competition.  If you "win" 
with key information omitted, it isn't much of a victory, and in fact a 
failure, IMHO.  ;-).

Making sure the quote isn't taken out of context, that I can agree with. 
Perhaps a rule should be that if you quote from an interview, the whole 
thing should be made available.  I'll do that below, for this one.

>From the same Larry McCaffrey interview I found this answer to a previous 
question about the possibility of having Wolfe's notes published someday:

>LM: Once the scope of The Book of the New Sun became obvious, you must have 
>sat down at >some point and developed some kind of detailed outline.

>Wolfe: Actually I never use an outline when I work. Even with something 
>like The Book of the >New Sun, where there's an elaborate structure, the 
>outline exists only in my head and not on >paper. The only exception to 
>that was with a book I did a while back called Free Live Free, in >which a 
>lot of the action took place in an old brick house on a city street. For 
>that book I had to >draw a floor plan of the two storys of the house 
>because otherwise I found myself getting tangled >up in such details as: 
>Could you see the street from this window?

The interview is from 1988, has some interesting background on Wolfe's life 
and family as well as other topics.   For those interested, here is a link 
to the whole thing:
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/wolfe46interview.htm

-bsharp

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net